Fèlix Millet, an uncomfortable corpse

From the revelation of the plunder at the Palau de la Música and the subsequent conviction for the illicit financing of Convergència, Fèlix Millet (i Tusell) became the only Catalan who has been able to experience the rapid mutation that exists between a cultural dignitary of Barcelona and a grotesque, half-dying old man against whom the majority of the country – including some of his natural accomplices – expelled tons of bile. The (very fast) journey from Olympus to Hades is very good for firing off jokes, memes, and 'cuñado' phrases about the former foreman of the Palau, but it falls very short when it comes to calibrating the importance of a man who embodied the country's decadence long before we knew about his fondness for money and before his excesses (the highlight of all of them will be, for ever and ever, his daughter's wedding at the Palau, financed by the father-in-law) became part of the national sport of scorn.

 Above all, Millet is and will be an uncomfortable corpse for Catalans, for the simple fact that the Palau case – a process that should have been called "Convergència case" – ended up being falsely closed through the convictions of a select group of scapegoats who still today represent a minimal part of all the mafia involved in the matter. At this point, not even the most naive person imagines that a defalcation as complex as that of the entity was a simple picnic of colleagues organized by Millet, his lieutenant Montull, and the treasurer of Convergència, Daniel Osàcar. It's amusing that, in Catalonia and throughout the state, cases of illegal financing and the awarding of commissions in exchange for public contracts only affect commission agents and treasurers, freeing from any blame a series of companies that continue to trot happily through the world of the free market with an impunity that even the Pope of Rome would envy.

Fèlix Millet leaves the world with a handful of silences (I hope with some revealing notes kept in a drawer in the Upper Diagonal) and today, surely, there will be people who will breathe very easily. All of this is well known, although it is necessary to put it on record again. But I insist that the character's decadence predates the entire Palau vaudeville. If we must remember Millet for something transcendent, it is for perfectly embodying the decadence of a bourgeoisie that had come of age culturally fortifying the country (and spending a few tons of money on the matter) only to end up seeing how sons and grandsons sold all their prestige in exchange for four flashy Ferraris and second homes that looked like an Easter cake. The leap that exists between the father Fèlix Millet (i Maristany), founder of El Matí and Òmnium, and his son is the transition between some hard-nosed activists and some simple caixacobri of the autonomous world.

It will be necessary to study, and I would say it is an pending task, how most of the cultural elites that sustained the country during Francoism ended up degraded into a lineage that merely took advantage of the channels devised by their ancestors to invent a career as a high-ranking official. This was Fèlix Millet, a courtier who peregrinated through the Orfeó, Barça, and Montserrat with the simple intention of using the symbolic value of Catalanist resistance as a little whore for the new partitocracy that emerged from the Transition. It is tremendous that, even today, Millet's misdeeds are excused by recalling that, at least, Fèlix reformed the Palau filling it with banknotes and symphonies, an explanation identical to the legitimization of corrupt practices as a foundation of modernity in 1990s Spain. Rather than discrediting Millet, we should seriously study him as the embodiment of a time that remains unknown.

This was Fèlix Millet, a courtier who peregrinated through the Orfeó, Barça, and Montserrat with the simple intention of using the symbolic value of Catalanist resistance as a little whore for the new partitocracy that emerged from the Transition

 A gentleman from Barcelona, ​​from that Barcelona, has left us. And until everything is cleaned up, that's how we must still refer to him. No matter how much it hurts.